Microsoft's .Net Impact
By now you've read and heard plenty about .Net, Microsoft's new enterprise application strategy. A nuts-and-bolts rundown of .Net's features may leave you asking, "Does this have anything to do with me?"
Stories by Tom Yager
Technology Product Focus: Building the perfect B2B exchange
Success breeds imitation. The digital exchange, a business-to-business marketplace in which goods and services are traded, grew out of the heady fortunes reaped by consumer exchanges such as EBay and Priceline.com. But as often happens when consumer technology is pressed into corporate service, early digital exchange players are finding that the Ebay and priceline.com approach doesn't always scale well.
Analysis: New standards orbit XML
Are recent changes to the XML standard and new XML extensions leaving you feeling lost in space? This primer will help you catch up on useful XML standards, soon-to-be standards and satellite technologies
Zope Is a Powerful Open-Source Server
Business Web sites, particularly those related to commerce, have rapidly evolved from static pages to personalized, database-driven, dynamic content sites. When a Web site becomes a Web application, old techniques (such as Perl scripts and CGI binaries written in C) crack under the pressure. It's not that they can't handle the traffic, but when you apply traditional Web techniques to large commercial projects, you get unwieldy, unmaintainable, and poorly integrated code -- and an application that never makes it past 1.0.
VPN: Light at the End of the Tunnel
The modem rack, once a staple of every department and agency server room, is heading for extinction. Now that virtually every remote worker can reach the Internet, direct dial-up access - with the support hassles, long-distance charges, busy signals, modem hang ups and line-quality problems that plague it - is giving way to virtual private networks (VPNs).
New Standards Orbit
Consider the modern database: sleek, efficient, and able to retrieve records in the blink of an eye. Data representation, management, and storage have risen to heights we dared not dream of only 10 years ago. But ironically, despite these achievements, the hippest, most cutting-edge data management technology today is (drumroll, please ...) delimited text.
Building the Perfect Exchange
Success breeds imitation. The digital exchange, a business-to-business marketplace in which goods and services are traded, grew out of the heady fortunes reaped by consumer exchanges such as eBay Inc. and priceline.com. But as often happens when consumer technology is pressed into corporate service, early digital exchange players are finding that the eBay/priceline.com approach doesn't always scale well.
High-Priced iAS 6.0 Hard to Justify
The foundation of every e-business application is a suite of essential services: database, transactions, messages, objects, and the Web. Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) from Sun Microsystems Inc. conveniently brings these services together in one bundle. If you're hosting custom Java applications, J2EE provides the framework needed to link those applications to users and to back-end services.
Microsoft's SQL Server Takes Aim at High End
To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a database is just a database. But these days we expect more from our database servers than mere data storage and acquisition. The database plays a pivotal role in determining how reliable, scalable, adaptable, and interoperable our large-scale applications will be.
Benchmark's DLT7 Autoloader a Bargain
Using a server-dedicated tape library is a good idea for many reasons, among them security, portability, convenience, and capacity, but we usually avoid specifying such devices because of the cost. Certain power-desktop applications, including scientific, analytical, financial, and digital media, consume massive amounts of disk space. Unattended backup strategies won't fly because no single tape drive can absorb enough data. That workstation's user must sit through every backup operation and manually change tapes. Shipping huge files through your LAN for centralized backup eats bandwidth and is a drain on shared media. Many systems need dedicated backup devices, yet all of our choices are either too small or too expensive.
Backup Exec Protects for a Price
Tape backup strategies and tools are essential components of an enterprise failure-recovery scheme. As networks grow, connecting more users to more data, tape is increasingly used for storing large files offline. A suitable enterprise backup strategy balances the requirements of basic data protection with quick, automated access to archived files.
BizTalk Simplifies Data Exchange
Even though the XML language has been promoted as a panacea for EDI (electronic data interchange), most businesses have yet to fully exploit its power. True, business data produced and consumed within your company yields easily to XML, but business-to-business data interchange presents huge challenges. Although you can apply XML today in custom-written b-to-b applications, a simpler solution would be a package that provides structured, secure, reliable document handling with minimal programming.
Microsoft's Centralized Services
When bullets are flying overhead, it's wise to lie low. That's been Microsoft Corp.'s strategy of late, speaking in whispers while Sun Microsystems Inc. and the U.S. Department of Justice deliberate on Microsoft's corporate fate. Now that the foregone guilty verdict is in, Microsoft is letting some long-confined strategy genies out of their bottles.
MDaemon Pro 3.0 Proves Speedy but Not Scalable
If you're planning to equip your shop with e-mail, you've got a few options. For around $50 per mailbox, you can sign up for the total e-collaboration experience with Microsoft Corp. Exchange or Lotus Development Corp. Domino/Notes and give users e-mail, group scheduling, conferencing, the works. But if all you need is a commercial-grade e-mail server, groupware is overkill. That $50 per mailbox adds up fast and doesn't cover training and administrative costs.
Enhydra broadens e-biz options
Creating and deploying e-business applications that leverage open-source technologies can be a new but worthwhile experience for corporate developers. Linux isn't the only thing coming from the open-source community; there are business applications, development tools, databases, and more. You'll still need to purchase support for these products and orient your staff to a new way of thinking about software. But it is a cost-effective solution for corporate application frameworks that closely rival commercial software products.